Today, like any other day, there are around 2.4 million people incarcerated in America’s federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Together, the nation’s inmates would constitute the fourth biggest city in the United States, knocking Houston down a notch.

Expand that grouping to everyone under correctional control, including probation and parole, and you’d have a metropolis of nearly 7 million, second only to New York. Finally, reunite the number of people that see the inside of a jail cell in a given year, and you’d have a prison city with a population as big as New York and Los Angeles combined (11.6 million).

Mass incarceration cripples families and communities, perpetuates poverty, recreates conditions for crime, and institutionalizes a form of racial control. As a result about one in four American adults (65 million) now have a criminal record.

Consider that for a moment—even in the context of historically disastrous periods of American history. One quarter is also the proportion of Americans unemployed in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, which included the “worst month for joblessness in the history of the United States.” It’s the same proportion as the casualty rate for Civil War soldiers. It’s almost three times the percent of Americans enlisted in World War II.

The issue has been slow to enter public discourse, perhaps because the most affected populations are also the most marginalized. From scenes of armored vehicles and snipers in Ferguson to the totalitarianism of the prison system as presented in Orange is the New Black, that may slowly be changing. Various advocacy groups are organizingmovements, some in Congress see an opportunity for bipartisan reform, and litigators continue to seek incremental victories against practices like stop-and-frisk.

But these efforts will not be enough to significantly affect a problem of this scale—at least not alone. Like the critical junctures of past generations, the Civil War or the Great Depression, this is a problem that requires presidential leadership. As the executive, Obama wields straightforward and fundamental power to reduce the scale of mass incarceration; as president, and in particular as a black male president, his ability to address the racial dimension of the system is significantly less clear. Nonetheless, with Attorney General Eric Holder stepping down, the Democrats' loss of the Senate in the midterms, and and the end of Obama’s presidency looming ever closer, the time and space for action continue to shrink and all signs point in one direction.

It isn’t that presidential action is necessarily a great choice. It’s that other options are structurally impossible or temporarily unavailable. For most policy issues, change can come about three ways, besides from the executive: popular movement, Congress, or legal challenge in the courts. The nature of mass incarceration in the U.S., though, prevents serious change through these alternative routes—even despite some recent signs for hope.

The protest surrounding Michael Brown’s shooting might seem like a chance for reform, but social and legal structures make popular movements against mass incarceration difficult. The populations most disadvantaged by the current system are traditionally the most marginalized, poor, and minority communities. They have the lowest social capital, little wealth for advocacy, and least access to political elites. Felon disenfranchisement stifles an electoral threat and substantially affects political outcomes. Parole conditions prevent felons from associating (read: organizing) with one another. The risk of arrest dissuades civil disobedience. Moreover, discrimination in hiring, continued state bans on SNAP and TANF eligibility, and abusive civil forfeiture practices mean that those who have gone through the justice system tend to lack financial means for effective advocacy. To compound issues, there are opposing forces with money to spare—the Corrections Corporation of America for example, whose business model is increased incarceration, recently paid more than $250,000 just to participate in the Republican Governors Association proceedings and has spent almost $14 million on lobbying in the last eight years. By contrast, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a leading reform advocacy organization, only spent $80,000 on federal lobbying in 2014.

At first glance, Congress seems to be a bright spot too, but a spree of lauded efforts offer less than meets the eye. Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul’s REDEEM Act has some important goals, aiming to divert juveniles from the justice system, expunge or seal records for certain youth and adults, and restore benefits to some former non-violent drug offenders. Yet it would only address a miniscule portion of the mass-incarceration system, and would only change conditions of release for some offenders rather than changing the underlying system—and that’s assuming it will pass. “Tough-on-crime” conservatives like Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, and Jeff Sessions hope to stand in the way of future reform, as they successfully did in taking the steam out of the Smarter Sentencing Act and denying Obama’s requests for new attorneys for pardon claims. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, did not oppose an amendment to remove SNAP-benefit eligibility for ex-felons and show signs of fearing “soft-on-crime” attacks in November. As Josh Barro noted in The New York Times, the party’s standard bearers have been silent when it counts. “No national Democratic politician, nobody of the sort who is likely to mount a presidential run anytime soon, has risen to give voice to the anger we’re seeing in Ferguson,” Barro writes. “Nobody seems eager to make police abuses or racial injustice a key issue in a national campaign.” There’s a compelling if cold-blooded logic to this: It’s not an issue that’s going to win new voters or cash.

Despite lacking those political disincentives, the courts aren’t a more attractive option for comprehensive changes to justice and policing. The judiciary has, however, begun to be sensitive to problems of incarceration, particularly prison overcrowding. Last year, the Supreme Court denied a petition from the state of California to delay a required reduction in the state’s prison population. The state must continue to seek reductions mandated by Brown v. Plata, in which the Court found that prison crowding resulted in conditions that violated the Eighth Amendment. However, as Marie Gottschalk wrote in The New Republic, the case is likely to have a narrow impact because of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a 1996 law that restricts prisoners’ access to the judicial system.

The door is at least ajar for challenges to prison conditions, unlike for suits based on racial discrimination. Michelle Alexander describes in The New Jim Crow how the Supreme Court “has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing.” Through a series of decisions—on racial profiling, private racial profiling litigation, racial bias in sentencing, and discriminatory law enforcement practices—the judiciary has repeatedly sided with the government against claims of prejudicial wrongdoing. In a rare victory, in 2013, a federal district court held in Floyd v. City of New York that the NYPD’s profiling and stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional. Though important, that victory was rare and local. Addressing a national institution will require nationally binding decisions.

The President’s Role: Scale

Even if a movement found lasting momentum, Congress miraculously passed legislation, and the judiciary suddenly reconsidered decades of precedence, it still would not be enough to address the enormity of mass incarceration. The White House’s power over the Justice Department, influence over public opinion, and discretion to create commissions and reorient priorities make the executive uniquely situated to begin reforms to match the size and scope of the bloated system. Obama is historically unique, too, in his biographical connection to the crisis: Many advocates insist that, as a black male, he has a heightened responsibility to address race in a system that disproportionately oppresses his demographic. Yet while there are clear actions and strategies available for the president to directly reduce incarceration, discrete actions toward racial justice are less clear, and the plausibility of a larger movement definitively muddled.

The most pressing task is to address the enabler of incarceration: money. Policy experts from leading liberal and conservative justice-reform think tanks told me that spending is the single most important avenue for reform. Money determines outcomes; change that and you can change the whole system. In fact, as Inimai Chettiar, director of Justice Program at NYU Law School’s Brennan Center, explained to me, the current system arose out of expanded federal spending. “The federal government enacted several laws that basically gave states more money if they would increase their prison population,” she said. Truth-in-sentencing guidelines, for example, disbursed billions of dollars to “ensure that people would spend 85 percent of their sentences in prison even though those sentences were already … overly harsh.” That flow of cash, a product of the War on Drugs, also came with a series of designated metrics—like arrests or drug seizures—that incentivized states to gear performance towards what they saw to be lucrative outcomes. If the Justice Department revised its interpretation of many of these laws, it could reshape the system.

One example of this phenomenon is the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which is both the biggest federal grant program for state and local criminal-justice authorities and emblematic of the way other programs function at the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security. The Brennan Center found that

The program inadvertently creates incentives to increase arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration. For example, it evaluates [grant] recipients on the number of criminal cases opened, but not whether crime dropped. It asks them how many kilos of cocaine were seized, but not how many people were sent to drug treatment. It asks how many cases were prosecuted, but not how many petty offenders were diverted from prison… Measuring the wrong practices strengthens the wrong practices.

Even a one-time influx of money has multiplying effects. “As prisons cost more and more, both because of more inmates and increases in health-care costs for inmates and staff, they monopolize corrections budgets,” explained Marc Levin, policy director at the conservative reform group Right on Crime. “Prison spending crowds out spending on the very programs such as probation, drug courts, electronic monitoring, treatment, and policing that can safely supervise offenders in the community and deter crime.” The result is a spiral that turns incarceration into mass incarceration.

There is a simple, powerful executive solution. The Department of Justice can ask states to prove their progress on more constructive measures—reduced recidivism, lower violent crime, better re-entry options, lower prison density. Redesigning federal funding and reporting mechanisms toward these explicit goals is well within the purview of the president’s set of tools, even if he can’t control the total amount of money appropriated. (The Brennan Center calls this “Success Oriented Funding.”) It’s startling to realize these aren’t already the metrics for justice.

Levin and other conservatives are eager to point out that similar strategies have already proved successful on the state level, in programs where state governments reward local jurisdictions that focus on violent and high-risk offenders instead of nonviolent arrests and seizures. After California passed the Community Corrections Performance Incentive Act in 2009, which encouraged probation offices to prioritize other methods over prison re-entry after supervision violations, the state saved almost $180 million in one year and cut the number of people sent back to prison by almost a quarter. Another program, in Illinois, gave more funds to counties that agreed to decrease new prisoner intake by 25 percent. Those funds go to incarceration alternatives like rehabilitation and supervision programs. Federal involvement could multiply the impact of these state-level programs by reaching the entire country.

Skeptics will protest that the president doesn’t have the right or power to so drastically change the outcomes of funds that originate from congressional appropriations. Not so: The authority to administer grants well within the rights, and practice, of the executive. William Howell, a professor of political science the University of Chicago, explains in his book Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action: “The President issues a directive, and absent a congressional or judicial response, the directive assumes law-like status … an executive order retains the weight of law until and unless someone else overturns it.” If the president wishes to “revamp the reporting procedures of federal agencies …[or] require that industries receiving federal contracts comply with certain government hiring and firing practices, he does not depend on Congress for legislative endorsement.” Given the gridlocked state of Congress, legislative response to this type of reorganization seems unlikely, and these measures can all go forward without new appropriations.

There’s a handful of even easier, less politically freighted measures Obama could undertake. A presidential panel on mass incarceration, though mostly symbolic, would help to bring national attention to the problem. While the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reduced disparities in crack and cocaine punishments, thousands of prisoners are still serving draconian sentences. To president could direct the Justice Department to proactively seek out candidates for commutation and pardon as a way to implement the guidelines passed in the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act that reduced disparities in crack and cocaine punishments to a further 5,000 individuals to whom the act currently does not apply. The government could also “ban the box” for federal hiring: Currently, the government lacks a system-wide policy on requiring applicants to disclose past criminal offenses. Employment, unsurprisingly, is a key determinant of reducing recidivism. These are simple and effective changes that require only Obama’s signature.

President’s Puzzle: Race

But the problem with mass incarceration is not just that it ensnares so many people, but how it does so: through the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of African-American and Latino people, particularly men. Dangerously, this creates a feedback loop, because criminalization of minorities leads to the public and media portrayal of minorities as criminals, which translates into more discriminatory enforcement. What makes these disproportionate racial impacts of mass incarceration so insidious, as The New Jim Crow argues, is that it is fundamentally “color-blind.” There are no laws that explicitly single out black men, but the system allows and facilitates discrimination. Traffic-stop policies have no explicit racial directions—they just set a broad list of “suspicious behaviors” that allows police to single out anyone they choose, often minorities.

Addressing this element of the system is a far more complicated puzzle for President Obama. Radically shrinking incarceration overall would be a major step, since minorities would disproportionately benefit. But that would be great disappointment to critics who complain that Obama has repeatedly avoided grappling with race head-on, even when it’s desperately needed. One school of thought holds that policy is an inadequate tool for purging the systemic racism in criminal justice, and a blunt discussion is needed. It would be impossible to ignore Obama, the president who can say that his son “would look like Trayvon,” they hold. But other than his comments on the shooting in Sanford, the President has deliberately avoided using events like Ferguson to engage racism in the justice system. Instead, he has left this role to Eric Holder, leading critics like journalist Steven Thrasher to worry that Holder’s departure forecloses any hopes for a national conversation on racial injustice. The attorney general, Thrasher wrote, “will at least address aloud your rage at the very institutional racism the president himself seems afraid to name.”

At the same time, Obama has been attacked by conservative critics who accuse him of injecting race where it has no place, but he’d come to this fight with an unusual set of allies, especially on the libertarian right. In addition to Rand Paul’s outspokenness about the racial impact of the justice system, the Charles Koch Institute—namesake of the major donor—whose conferences and advertising have approached the disparate racial effects head on. Obama could emphasize that as a black male who used marijuana, he had much greater odds of ending up in a prison cell than in the Oval Office. “The main role that the executive can play is call attention to the problem and increase public and political support for a solution,” says Chettiar. There are good reasons to believe the president should be the one to take up that role on racial injustice, too.

Act Now

Of course, these recommendations are all moot if they don’t square with political reality. Surprisingly—in the age of ultra-partisanship—the country seems more than ready to embrace leadership towards incarceration reform. From liberal bastions like Massachusetts to conservative strongholds like Texas, voters have expressed strong preferences for reform. “I think there is more bipartisanship on this issue than virtually any other,” Levin says. Presidential leadership could unite disparate, state-level progress, but Democratic fear of appearing soft on crime has blunted any political movement. “What should be a progressive issue is being lead mostly by conservatives,” Chettiar says. Nonetheless, conservative reformers like Levin would welcome them, even though they’re “a bit late to the party.”

Not everyone is convinced that the president holds such sway—or should. Many advocates would prefer to continue honing in on state successes and problems; some conservatives would surely call a presidential move just another case of “anti-constitutional” overreach; other political theorists, in the model of the pioneering scholar of presidential power Richard Neustadt, would insist that any reform starts with Obama persuading others, rather than going it alone.

The more compelling dissent comes not from skeptics of presidential power but from liberal populists. Michelle Alexander remains hopeful that collective, rather than executive, action will overturn the system. "I am much more interested in what the people of Ferguson are going to do and say, and what people of conscience everywhere are going to do and say,” she told me. “What the people in the streets, and in barber shops, and on college campuses, and in prison cells do and say right now is more important than what the Supreme Court or the president of the United States might do or say.” Any issue so tied up in basic human dignity has to be handled on an individual level, outside of hierarchical approaches, she says.

For the optimistic reformer, there are signs that society is on the verge of a fundamental reckoning with the system of mass incarceration, the failed War on Drugs, and their attendant forms of racial control. But it would be a political and moral mistake to ignore the power of the presidency to catalyze the transformation. “This is a rare opportunity,” Chettiar says. “There is so much more attention being paid to this issue than ever before…I think that’s why there’s even more responsibility on public and political leaders to be talking about this issue—because if they don’t, I don’t think any action will take place.”

Two years ago, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker that “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact.” Barack Obama has a clear path to change that fact—he just has to take it.

But officials in the Obama administration and on Capitol Hill say there is one issue that may have enough cross-party appeal to break through the logjams. That issue is criminal justice reform.

With Democrats holding the White House and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, it's been suggested that the odds are slim of any major legislation becoming law over the next two years.

But officials in the Obama administration and on Capitol Hill say there is one issue that may have enough cross-party appeal to break through the logjams. That issue is criminal justice reform.

"It is on my list of things that are in the sphere of the possible," said one top Obama administration official who discussed the president's legislative priorities on condition of anonymity. "We are going to work hard at it ... Putting a bipartisan imprint on sentencing reform would be a big achievement."

President Barack Obama has long sought solutions to address the nation's soaring rates of mass incarceration. And the administration official described a "hopeful" mood in the White House regarding the chances of serious reform by 2016. Part of the reason for cautious optimism is that some high-profile Republicans share the objective. Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been open about his concern with racial disparities in incarceration rates. Paul, who is likely to run for president in 2016, may reason that it's in his interest to have a major legislative victory along with bipartisan credentials under his belt.

Last session, Paul's office alone introduced five bills dealing with everything from scaling back mandatory minimum sentencing to civil asset forfeiture reform to shielding medical marijuana businesses from federal intervention. Most recently, Paul teamed up with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) to introduce the REDEEM Act, aimed at reducing the national prison population and rolling back draconian sentencing rules.

“I think there is potential for greater gains with Republicans and Democrats on these issues,” said a senior aide to Paul who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. “Sen. Paul is going to push very hard for criminal justice reform in the next Congress.”

Talks between Paul and Democratic staff, including the office of current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), have continued throughout the term and are still ongoing. A senior Democratic Senate aide said he expects the incoming Judiciary Committee to take the lead on the matter when Congress reconvenes.

"This is actually something that could get done," said the aide. "Sentencing reform and even maybe [rewriting] the Voting Rights Act [could happen], primarily because it is something Rand Paul seems to want to get done."

Booker, meanwhile, told HuffPost that he's gotten indications from GOP senators that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who will take over as majority leader next year, is taking the issue seriously.

"I've gotten really good signs from my colleagues that this is something that there is a commitment [to do]," said Booker. "Just from Mitch McConnell's strong statements over the last several years, I'm pretty confident that this is something he wants to lead on."

Should lawmakers act on criminal justice reform, it would be a rare instance of Congress responding to voters. During the 2014 midterm elections, voters approved sweeping drug and criminal justice reform measures in multiple states, setting the stage for what may prove to be even more significant policy shifts over the next two years and beyond.

“This Election Day was an extraordinary one for the marijuana and criminal justice reform movements,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, during a call with reporters after last week's elections.

In Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C. this past Tuesday, voters legalized recreational marijuana. A medical marijuana measure in Florida received 57 percent of the vote, though it fell short of the 60 percent support it needed to pass. There were smaller-scale victories for marijuana decriminalization in local jurisdictions in Maine and New Mexico, while voters in California and New Jersey approved reforms to prison sentencing and bail policy that are expected to benefit thousands of low-level drug offenders annually.

"There is a surprising confluence between deficit hawks and progressives who are focused on the social justice angle, particularly when it comes to nonviolent minor drug offenders,” said Ben LaBolt, a former Obama White House spokesman who dealt with the judicial issues portfolio.

This point was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in California with the passage of Proposition 47, a measure that reclassified many low-level offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Prop. 47 is expected to result in the downgrading of an estimated40,000 felonies a year in the state.

Support for Prop. 47 came from an incredibly wide cross-section of liberal and conservative figures and groups -- everyone from Sen. Paul to musician Jay-Z to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to the American Civil Liberties Union to the California Teachers Association to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the largest business chamber in the state of California.

“We had backing from conservative Christian leaders, Democrat leaders, national conservatives and liberals in support as well,” said Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a nonprofit group and a key backer of Prop. 47, during a call with reporters Wednesday. “It really demonstrates that both conservatives and liberals support this.”

The United States is home to just 5 percent of the world’s population, but a full 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. The harsh and lengthy sentences for nonviolent drug possession or distribution crimes have helped bolster that figure. In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from the Sentencing Project, a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders serving prison sentences had ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom were not high-level operators and did not have prior criminal records.

As of last week's elections, four states and the nation's capital have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and 23 states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes. While pot still remains illegal under federal law, attitudes are clearly changing rapidly. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has even predicted that before the end of the decade, the federal government will legalize weed.

There's evidence to suggest that Blumenauer's optimism may not be totally unfounded. Last year, the federal government allowed Colorado's and Washington's historic marijuana laws to take effect. This February, President Obama signed the 2014 farm bill, which legalized industrial hemp production for research purposes in the states that permit it, and the first hemp crops in U.S. soil in decades are already growing. And in May, the House of Representatives passed bipartisan measures attempting to limit Drug Enforcement Administration crackdowns on state-legal medical marijuana shops, as well as agency interference in state-legal hemp programs.

“The outcome of this year's midterm elections set the stage for an even bigger year in the 2016 presidential election, but we're likely to see some steps forward next year, as well,” said Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, a key backer of multiple state cannabis legalization measures. “We could very well see states adopt laws that decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, or even laws that make marijuana legal and regulate it like alcohol."

Like Paul, some House Republicans are trying to make sure the party rides the changing wave of public opinion rather than be drowned by it.

Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) have both sponsored House amendments seeking to prevent the federal government from prosecuting people for simply following their state marijuana laws. Tax reform advocate Grover Norquist, meanwhile, has been a vocal supporter of giving legal marijuana businessesthe same federal tax breaks that other businesses already receive.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), a vocal supporter of drug policy reform who has sponsored multiple bills seeking protection for state-legal marijuana businesses and advocating full-scale federal legalization of the drug, said he expects criminal justice reform to remain a topic of interest in the House even as the chamber becomes more Republican-leaning.

“I think Congress will make some progress in catching up with allowing states to have flexibility in their drug policies in the coming years. There’s strong rank-and-file support on both sides on this issue,” Polis said. “But the challenge will be Mitch McConnell and [House Speaker] John Boehner [(R-Ohio)], who have not yet given indications about whether they themselves are willing to accept progress in this direction.”

While McConnell has said he’s against legalizing marijuana, he does have one of the country's few active hemp pilot programs in his home state of Kentucky. The hope among advocates is that exposure to the new laws in Oregon, Alaska and D.C. will persuade McConnell and other lawmakers to soften their positions.

Blumenauer, a sponsor of the marijuana business tax break measure as well as multiple federal marijuana reform bills, said that last week's marijuana wins at the ballot box have set the stage for “bigger and faster progress” in drug policy reform.

“From hemp in conservative Kentucky, legal recreational marijuana in diverse states like Colorado, Alaska and Oregon to legal marijuana in the White House’s own backyard, the movement to end the drug war -- through changing policies around drugs or their associated crimes -- is gaining speed like few other movements,” Blumenauer said.

"We have Republican partners on virtually all of this marijuana legislation, and then the new president and a better Congress is going to be elected in 2016," he continued. "So I truly think the sky’s the limit over the next four years.”

You might call it a nascent civil rights movement in response to the new Jim Crow. About 150 people gathered Saturday morning at St. Peter Baptist Church in Glen Allen to discuss mass incarceration, the war on drugs and their effect on the black community. The Virginia Alliance Against Mass Incarceration has scheduled forums Wednesday in Richmond’s East End.

“The endgame is just public awareness through the community and churches,” with the hoped-for result of influencing legislation in the General Assembly, said Jesse Frierson, executive director of the alliance.

The gospel of this movement is Michelle Alexander’s best-seller, “The New Jim Crow,” which details the rising mass incarceration of minorities. The author argues against policies that swelled the U.S. prison population from 300,000 to more than 2 million in less than three decades — the world’s highest incarceration rate.

Alexander’s lectures in Norfolk and Richmond in 2011 served as a catalyst for the alliance.

The toll of drug offense-fueled incarcerations on the black community has even conservative churchgoers exploring all options.

During a discussion last year at a local church, an impromptu show of hands had one-half of the audience in favor of the decriminalization, control, regulation and taxation of currently illegal drugs, Frierson said. One-quarter of the audience was opposed, and the remainder wanted more information.

“That, frankly, was surprising to everybody,” he said.

Of keen interest to the alliance is the restoration of voting rights for 450,000 disenfranchised felons in Virginia. Despite the support of Gov. Bob McDonnell, a measure to automatically restore the vote to nonviolent felons who have finished their sentence was killed in the state legislature. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, has appointed an advisory panel to explore options under the state constitution on the restoration of voting rights.

Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, were invited to Saturday’s event but did not attend. But McAuliffe, in a letter to the attendees, said “unfair and unequal enforcement of our drug laws is not an argument or a talking point; it is a fact.

“Study after study shows that while drug use is similar among different ethnic groups, young African-American men and young Latino men are arrested and incarcerated at dramatically higher rates than young men from other groups. This is devastating communities and hurting our society.”

But as McDonnell’s case shows, a sympathetic governor hardly guarantees results in the legislature. Or as Del. Joseph D. Morrissey, D-Henrico, said Saturday: “Nobody ever lost an election by being tough on crime.”

St. Peter, on Mountain Road in northern Henrico County, is the church of Kemba Smith Pradia, a leading advocate in the fight for voting rights of former offenders. Her franchise was restored last year by McDonnell, more than a decade after she served six years of a federal prison sentence for drug-related offenses. She was granted clemency in 2000 by President Bill Clinton.

The audience viewed selected scenes from the documentary “The House I Live In,” a critique of the U.S. criminal justice system whose producers include Danny Glover, John Legend, Brad Pitt and Russell Simmons.

Part of the film showed the toll methamphetamine has exacted on white, jobless rural residents in America’s heartland, as drug use and illegal activities fill the economic void. The impact of crystal meth in those communities was likened to the effect of crack cocaine on black urban communities in the 1980s.

During the wide-ranging panel discussion that followed, state Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico — who sat on a panel with Morrissey, Pradia and Henrico Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor — said the counterproductive war on drugs coincided with the “world of no.”

First came “Just Say No,” the Reagan administration’s response to drug use. Later came “no parole,” Gov. George Allen’s politically popular policy. That was followed by “No Car Tax,” a bumper sticker that helped land Jim Gilmore in the Executive Mansion after Allen.

Parole abolition helped fuel prison construction. And the car tax reduction blew a hole in the state budget that McEachin says has hurt K-12 education funding.

Virginia, in an attempt to fill empty prison beds, began importing inmates from as far away as Hawaii. A new $105 million correctional center in Grayson County has sat empty for 2½ years because of a lack of money and the state’s declining prison population. Other correctional facilities have been closed.

Meanwhile, prisons in economically bereft communities have become as valued for job creation as for incarceration. Which begs the question: What’s driving criminal justice policy?

Conversations on that and other issues “are taking place in Baptist churches across Virginia,” Frierson said. “This is where it starts. It starts with us.”

Transforming poorer neighborhoods into desirable real estate for the new elites often requires getting rid of the poor: jail becomes the new home for many. The U.S. leads the world in prisoners with 2.27 million in jail and more than 4.8 million on parole. Minorities have been especially hard hit, forming 39.4% of the prison population, with one in three black men expected to serve time during their lifetimes.

How is it that our land, supposedly the beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the world, puts so many of its own people into prison?

We usually attribute the prisoner increase to a combination of overt racism and Nixon's war on drugs, followed by Rockefeller's "three strikes" legislation in New York, and then the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act with its mandatory sentences. While racism and these laws certainly provide ample opportunity to incarcerate millions for violating senseless prohibition laws, they do not tell the whole story.

Racism was just as virulent, if not more so, long before the dramatic rise in prisoners set in during the 1980s and 1990s. Just because there are draconian laws on the books, it doesn't explain why they are so dutifully enforced. It also doesn't explain why so many are willing to risk prison, knowing the increasing odds of getting caught.

If we dig deeper, we'll see that the rise in incarceration corresponds with the rise of financialization and the dramatic increase in Wall Street incomes. Of course, just because trend lines on charts rise and fall together doesn't mean one causes the other. But this correspondence is much more than coincidence.

In fact, we could show you a dozen other trends lines about financialization, wealth and the rising incomes of America's elites that follow the same patterns over similar years as the incarceration rate. What is the connection?

'Unleashing' Wall Street destroys manufacturing, older urban areas and black America's upward mobilityBy the end of the 1970s, our policy establishment embarked upon a new experiment to shock the nation out of stagflation (the crushing combination of high unemployment and high inflation). To do so, neo-liberal economists successfully argued that Wall Street should be deregulated and that taxes on the wealthy should be cut to spur new entrepreneurial activity that would enrich us all.

Entrepreneurial activity certainly increased, and with a vengeance. Rather than create new jobs and industries that would promote shared prosperity, a new and invigorated Wall Street set about to devastate American manufacturing. Its goal was, and still is, to make money from money, not to make money by producing tangible goods and services. Wall Street's main product for America is debt. And its profits derive from loading up the country with it, and then collecting compound interest.

Wave after wave of financial corporate raiders (now politely called private equity firms) swooped in to suck the cash flow out of healthy manufacturing facilities. Wall Street, freed from its New Deal shackles, loaded companies up with debt, cut R&D, raided pension funds, slashed wages and benefits, and decimated well-paying jobs in the U.S. while shipping many abroad. The released cash flow was used to pay back the financiers, buy up stock to drive up its price, and pay out dividends. Nearly half the raided companies failed as America's heartland in a few short years turned into the Rust Belt.

But Wall Street prospered as its profits rose to account for nearly 40% of all corporate profits by 2003, up from less than 10 percent in 1982 (It would take more space than we have here to explain why this had little to do with "unfair" foreign competition. We could also show that so called free-trade agreements were designed by financiers to promote their interests, not ours.)

The catastrophic collapse in manufacturing jobs was particularly tragic for black Americans who during the first two decades after WWII had seen their standard of living rise as they entered higher paying industries. As the Wall Street vultures sucked the life out of these industries, black Americans found themselves in dying urban areas where the next best jobs paid less than half what manufacturing once paid. If lucky, young minority men and women could find work in the public sector which still was unionized. More typically, scarce jobs might be found in fast-food chains, box stores, warehouses, and in the lower ranks of the healthcare system. Overall, however, unemployment rates soared, especially for minority youth. Participation in the underground economy often became the only means of survival.

Financialization, gentrification and the removal of low-income residentsNot only does financialization destroy middle-income manufacturing jobs in urban areas, but the process also removes low-income neighborhoods through gentrification. The rise of high-income financiers (and the desire of banks to loan more money to them) creates upward pressure on housing prices in urban areas that cater to elites, like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. As land values rise rapidly, lower-income residents are squeezed out of their neighborhoods, which are revamped into fashionable townhouses and apartments for the wealthy. (Typically, the children of the well-to-do unconsciously serve as forward troops as they flock into lower-income areas in major cities, seeking to support themselves as artists and young professionals.)

As hundreds of neighborhoods are transformed, higher income residents require more protection from the alternative low-income economy, called "crime in the streets." As mayors cater to these new elites, police patrols increase and incarceration rises through "stop and frisk" programs which invariably target minorities.

Simply put, for financial interests to transform poorer neighborhoods into desirable real estate for the new elites, it is necessary to get rid of the poor. Jail becomes the new home for many.

The housing bubble and bust further destroyed lower income neighborhoods and decent-paying public sector jobs. Not only did financial interests feast upon productive firms, but they thrived on consumer debt (yet another chart that mirrors the incarceration rate).

The housing bubble, which was entirely engineered by Wall Street, created enormous demand for junk mortgages to package into securities which then turned toxic. When the bubble burst, the biggest losers were lower-income homeowners who thought they had finally gotten a piece of the American dream. With declining housing prices they found themselves underwater and/or living in neighborhoods with hundreds of abandoned homes. Their debts, remained, while, as we all know, the richest of the rich were bailed out.

Because of the Wall Street crash, revenue-starved urban areas in the Rust Belt were hit once again. With unemployment higher than anytime since the Great Depression, business and worker tax revenues fell, leading to cuts in public employee jobs and benefits—the very jobs middle-income minorities were fortunate to find as manufacturing declined over the previous decades.

Detroit became the poster child for the ravages brought about by financialization. First corporate raiders and private equity firms squeezed the life out of manufacturing all over Michigan. Then the Wall Street crash destroyed more jobs and undermined the tax base, leading to urban bankruptcy and more job loss in the public sector.

Wall Street's Jobs Program: IncarcerationWhat will happen to all those unemployed, given the massive shortfall in jobs? What will happen to those trapped in neighborhoods crammed with foreclosed homes? Where is the jobs program for the millions who need it?

High finance has the answer that is now the de-facto government policy—put the dislocated, the unemployed, the "surplus" youth in jail.

That's because financial interests and their crony politicians have no interest at all in traditional jobs programs that could put millions of young people to work. Instead, they are doing all they can to bring austerity policies to America. The less government spends on public services and safety net programs, the more money it has to support Wall Street. As government services are cut, state and local governments must turn even more to Wall Street in order to finance infrastructure projects (where the total cost including interest payments is usually several times the initial costs of construction).

Wall Street's super-profits can only continue if public and consumer funds are transferred to high finance via interest payments on loans. So public jobs programs are out of the question, and both parties have been "convinced" (with campaign contributions) that we can't afford them.

So that leaves us with one and only one jobs program—incarceration—which is also a growth opportunity for Wall Street. As public revenues falter, pressure will mount to privatize more and more correctional facilities and law enforcement functions, opening up lucrative opportunities for more privatization and more Wall Street loans to make it happen.

So by all means, let's legalize drugs, get rid of mandatory sentencing and prohibit "stop and frisk." But until we tackle financialization and its destruction of neighborhoods and jobs, we will channel another generation into the underground economy—and into jail.

The holiday season is here. In millions of homes across the country, loved ones are missing from holiday celebrations, parents are longing for the warm embrace of a son or daughter, siblings are reminiscing of times past, and children are longing for their moms and dads.

For millions of families, a loved one is currently in jail or prison. A few years ago, while working in Harlem, I came across one such mother who spent numerous holidays without her only son – he was awaiting sentencing in Pennsylvania for a nonviolent drug offense. She was worried, scared and wondered if he would ever come home. Unfortunately, this is the question on the minds of millions of family members as we begin this holiday season.

This Thanksgiving, as we give thanks for the many blessings and mercies bestowed on our families – let us turn our silence and shame into love and compassion for those who cannot be with their families because they are victims of our callous criminal justice system. Many brothers, sisters and family members are torn away from their families for minor infractions that many of us have engaged in at some point in our life.

Even though public opinion has shifted dramatically against the war on drugs, and Colorado and Washington are moving forward with marijuana legalization, hundreds of thousands of young black men linger behind bars for nothing more than a drug law violation every year.

With a very heavy heart, as a mother and advocate for drug policy reform, I wish other mothers and fathers who are victims of the drug war a “happy” holidays – but can one truly have a “happy” holidays when there’s an empty chair at the family table? As the Johnny Bristol song reminds us, “memories don’t leave like people like do – they always stay with you whether they’ve been good or bad.” But somehow, we have found a way to hide the memories and presence of our loved ones who are in prison or in treatment in a very dark and murky place.

As a member of Moms United to End the War on Drugs, I am saddened by the overwhelming silence that exists regarding the number of Americans who are in prisons instead of with their families during a time when most of us are talking about spending time with our loved ones.

This holiday season, as we prepare to bask in the warmth and love of family and friends, I encourage you to think of a family member, neighbor, schoolmate or friend that is behind bars for a nonviolent drug offense or who was a victim of our misguided drug war.

If you are a family member or friend of someone who is currently in prison, jail or in a treatment facility this holiday season – you are not alone. Let us join our hearts by bringing back the memories of our beloveds into our homes and keeping them forever in our hearts – especially during this time of year. And, as we look forward to a bright and prosperous 2014, let us collectively wish and work for more humane, just and compassionate drug policies.

A leading law and policy institute unveiled a new proposal to reform the federal government’s largest criminal justice funding program. The Brennan Center for Justice's new proposal, Reforming Funding to Reduce Mass Incarceration, sets out a plan to link federal grant money to modern criminal justice goals – as a tool to promote innovative crime-reduction policies nationwide.

The proposal, dubbed by the authors “Success-Oriented Funding,” would recast the federal government’s $352 million Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, by changing the measures used to determine success of its grants. It reflects a broader proposed shift in criminal justice programs at all levels of government. The proposal could be implemented without legislation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Funding what works and demanding success is critical, especially given the stakes in criminal justice policy. This report marks an important step toward implementing this funding approach in Washington and beyond,” said Peter Orszag, former Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who wrote the proposal’s foreword.

The Center proposes major changes to the program’s “performance measures”, which are used to track a grant recipient’s use of the funds. The proposal notes:

Current measures inadvertently incentivize unwise policy choices. Federal officials ask states to report the number of arrests, but not whether the crime rate dropped. They measure the amount of cocaine seized, but not whether arrestees were screened for drug addiction. They tally the number of cases prosecuted, but not whether prosecutors reduced the number of petty crime offenders sent to prison. In short, today’s JAG performance measures fail to show whether the programs it funds have achieved “success”: improving public safety without needless social costs.

“What gets measured gets done,” said Inimai Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center and one of the report’s authors. “Criminal justice funding should reflect what works. Too often, today, it is on autopilot. This proposal reflects an innovative new wave of law enforcement priorities that already have begun to transform policy. That is the way to keep streets safe, while reducing mass incarceration.”

Success-Oriented Funding would hold grant recipients accountable for what they do with the money they receive. By implementing direct links between funding and proven results, the government can ensure the criminal justice system is achieving goals while not increasing unintended social costs or widening the pipeline to prison.

The JAG program was launched nearly three decades ago at the height of the crime wave. As such, its performance measures center on questions about the quantity of arrests and prosecutions. Although funding levels are not based on rates of arrests and prosecutions, interviews with over 100 state and local officials and recipients found that many grant recipients interpreted the performance measure questions as indicating how they should focus their activity.

The Brennan Center’s new, more robust performance measures would better record how effective grant recipients are at reducing crime in their state or locality. For example, current volume-based performance measures record activity, such as total number of arrests, number of people charged with gun crimes, or number of cases prosecuted. The Brennan Center’s proposed new Success-Oriented performance measures record results, such as the increase or decrease in violent crime rate or what percentage of violent crime arrests resulted in convictions.

A Blue Ribbon Panel of criminal justice experts also provided guidance and comments on the measures, including leaders in law enforcement, prosecutors and public defenders, former government officials, and federal grant recipients. Participants included David LaBahn, president of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys; John Firman, research director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police; and Jerry Madden, a senior fellow at Right on Crime.

“The Brennan Center’s proposed reforms will provide state and local law enforcement with the tools they need to evaluate how successful their own practices are at reducing crime, while encouraging them to adopt innovative crime-reduction programs developed by colleagues across the country.” said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation and a 33-year law enforcement veteran.

“Those of us who are conservatives know the importance of measuring performance and ensuring that incentives in any system are aligned to the desired goals,” said Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and one of the nation’s leading conservative criminal justice experts. “We have documented the benefits of policies in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas that tie funding to goals such as reducing recidivism, substance abuse, and the unnecessary incarceration of nonviolent offenders. This report highlights how the federal government can learn from and promote the most successful of these state and local programs, in order to create a more modern and effective justice system.”

In addition to implementing new metrics, the Brennan Center recommends the Justice Department require grant recipients to submit reports. By mandating that grant recipients answer the questions, the Justice Department can align state and local practices with modern criminal justice priorities of reducing both crime and mass incarceration. The reported data should then be publicly available for further analysis.

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve our systems of democracy and justice. We work to hold our political institutions and laws accountable to the twin American ideals of democracy and equal justice for all. The Center’s work ranges from voting rights to campaign finance reform, from racial justice in criminal law to Constitutional protection in the fight against terrorism. A singular institution — part think tank, part public interest law firm, part advocacy group, part communications hub — the Brennan Center seeks meaningful, measurable change in the systems by which our nation is governed.

Since my CounterPunch article last November which assessed the state of the movement against mass incarceration, the rumblings of change in the criminal justice have steadily grown louder. Attorney General Eric Holder has continued to stream his mild-mannered critique by raising the issue of felony disenfranchisement; the President has stepped forward with a proposal for clemency for people with drug offenses that could free hundreds.

In the media, we’ve seen a scathing attack on America’s addiction to punishment in the New York Times and the American Academy of Sciences has released perhaps the most comprehensive critique of mass incarceration to date, the 464 page The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. In late May, several dozen conservatives including Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and former NRA President David Keene pulled together the first Right on Crime (ROC) Leadership Summit in Washington DC. The ROC, an organization which boasts a coterie of members with impeccable right wing credentials, reiterated the need for conservatives to drive the process of prison reform. The Conference “call to action” argued: “In our earnest desire to have safer neighborhoods, policy responses to crime have too often neglected core conservative values — government accountability, personal responsibility, family preservation, victim restoration, fiscal discipline, limited government and free enterprise.” Gingrich engaged in similar kinds of soul searching: “Once you decide everybody in prison is also an American then you gotta really reach into your own heart and ask, is this the best we can do?”

All of this has precipitated another round of optimistic cries about the possibilities of a Left-Right Coalition on mass incarceration, including a high profile Time Magazine op-ed co-authored by Norquist and MoveOn.org co-founder Joan Blades.

While the spirit of reconciliation in criminal justice attracts most of the media attention, a number of pieces have also emerged rejecting any rush to positive judgment. For example, fellows at the Brennan Center compiled a statistically based report which contends that careral change has not yet turned the corner while Black Agenda Report co-founder Bruce Dixon asserted that Obama’s clemency measures would have no significant impact on mass incarceration.

However, another process, likely at least as important in the long run as number crunching, coalitions or clemency also has been gaining steam. The official voices of incarceration- politicians, corrections officials, private prison operators, prison guards unions and county sheriffs, are exploring changing discourse and cosmetic reform in order to avoid systemic restructuring. In the business world, they call this re-packaging.

Re-Packaging Mass Incarceration: Carceral HumanismCurrently this re-packaging assumes several forms. One of the most important is carceral humanism or what some people refer to as incarceration lite. Carceral humanism recasts the jailers as caring social service providers. The cutting edge of carceral humanism is the field of mental health. According to a recent report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, in 2012 the US had over 350,000 people with serious mental health issues in prisons and jails as compared to just 35,000 in the remaining state mental health facilities. Prisons and jails have become the new asylums and the jailers are waking up to the fact that mental health facilities also represent a new cash cow. Likely the most important examples of carceral humanism are happening in California. There Governor Jerry Brown has played a shell game called realignment in which he’s transferred thousands of people from state facilities to county jails in order to comply with a Federal court order to reduce the state prison population. To help counties adapt to all these new prisoners, the Governor put up $500 million to the state’s sheriffs to build extensions onto their jails. In response, the Sheriffs had to come to Sacramento to pitch for a slice of that money. They didn’t come talking about public safety. Their mantra focused on caring-providing opportunities and improved circumstances for those in custody. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s summary from Lake County, one of the 15 winners out of 36 submissions, is illustrative:

“$20 million for a new Type II, 40-bed women’s jail with a new stand alone 39-bed Medical/Mental Health Services building with program space, a new administration building, and renovations so that existing space can accommodate programs.”

The new jails are about institutionalizing the funding of mental health and other services behind the walls, further diverting money from the already bare bones social services in communities. The Lake County proposal also featured another prominent strain of carceral humanism- a woman’s jail or in the present corrections jargon, a “gender-responsive” facility. Since mainstream research now argues that women experience incarceration differently than men, law enforcement is waving the gender banner to access more funding for construction. Los Angeles lies at the cutting edge in this regard. In March the LA Board of Supervisors authorized $5.5 million for consultants to draw up a plan for what some law enforcement people are calling a “women’s village.” Deputy Sheriff Terri McDonald of Los Angeles suggested that the new facility could be a place where “women and children could serve their time together.”

Carceral humanism has also surfaced in the repackaging of immigration detention centers. The latest immigration prisons carry the label “civil detention” centers. The GEO Group, the nation’s second largest private prison operator, opened their latest such facility in Karnes Texas. The LA Times called it a “pleasant surprise for illegal immigrants.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials boast that people detained in Karnes won’t be housed in cells but in “suites” holding eight people. Those detained will be supervised not by guards or correctional officers but by “resident advisers.”

Repackaging 2: Non-Alternative Alternatives to IncarcerationA second form of repackaging mass incarceration falls under the heading of non-alternative alternatives to incarceration. These non-alternatives purport to change things but in essence simply perpetuate the culture of punishment. The most common forms of these are Drug Courts, Mental Health Courts and Day Reporting Centers. While many of these may be well-intentioned and in some cases have positive effects, they typically involve heavy monitoring of a person’s behavior including frequent drug testing, limitations on movement and association, a whole range of involuntary but supposedly therapeutic programs of dubious value and very little margin of error to avoid reincarceration. Perhaps the most extreme example of a non-alternative alternative to incarceration, and one which is likely to gain increasing traction, is electronic monitoring.

While advocates claim electronic monitoring facilitates employment, building family ties and participation in community activities, my interviews with a number of people on a monitor have revealed a different experience. Jean – Pierre Shackelford, who spent two years on an ankle bracelet in Columbus, Ohio said that he felt like his probation officer had him in a “choke hold” while he was on an ankle bracelet. He labelled monitoring “another form of control and slavery, 21st century electronic style.” Shaun Harris, on a monitor for a year in Michigan called it a form of privatized incarceration, “it’s like you just turned my family’s house into another cell” was his comment. Shackelford and Harris, like many others I spoke with, both reported difficulty getting movement for family activities and a lack of clarity about what was and wasn’t permitted. Shackelford finally took to going to church because that seemed to be the only activity his probation officer would approve. Both Shackelford and Harris, like most people interviewed, complained that they could be put on 24 hour “lockdown” (meaning they couldn’t leave the house at all) for any reason for an indefinite period and there would be no way to appeal such a decision. Even a late return home from work due to a delay in public transportation could result in a re-arrest. To make matters worse, most electronic monitors come with a daily user fee which ranges anywhere from five to twenty dollars a day.

While the punitive nature of ankle bracelet regimes is a cause for concern, the potential to implement exclusion zones with GPS-based monitors contains more serious long-term implications. Exclusion zones are places where monitors are programmed not to let people go. At the moment authorities mainly use exclusion zones to keep individuals with a sex offense history away from schools and parks. But such zones have the potential to become new ways to reconstruct the space of our cities, to keep the good people in and the bad people out. This technology, which can be set up via smart phones, holds the possibility to turn houses, buildings, even neighborhoods into self-financing sites of incarceration. In the meantime, firms like the GEO Group, which owns BI Incorporated, the nation’s largest provider of electronic monitoring technology and backup services, are experimenting with new target groups for ankle bracelets. In parts of California and Texas they’ve used electronic monitors on kids with school truancy records. Under a $370 million contract, BI already has thousands of people awaiting immigration adjudication on monitors. Packaged as an alternative these bracelets actually represent a new horizon for incarceration, finding ways to do it cheaper with technology through the private sector and then getting the user to pay, likely a model that would line up squarely with Right on Crime’s notions of reform..

Re-Packaging: Why Now?Most commentators attribute the spirit of change in criminal justice to a belated recognition of the fundamental irrationality of spending so much money locking up so many people for so long. As Grover Norquist put it, “Conservatives may have wanted more incarceration than was necessary in the past, so what we’re trying to do is find out about what works.”

Such analyses make perfect sense but they also ignore a big picture political question. Mass incarceration is becoming a flash point of rebellion and resistance, with African American communities the most visible hot spot. Mass incarceration and the racialized vagaries of criminal justice have been going on for decades but recently we’ve seen new levels of anger and frustration in reaction to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, as well as to the sentencing of Marissa Alexander. Even mainstream Black commentators like Melissa Harris-Perry appear incensed. At the grassroots level we’ve witnessed campaigns against stop and frisk, solitary confinement, mandatory minimums, crack cocaine laws and a host of new jails and prisons. On the ideological plane, the notion of the New Jim Crow, categorizing mass incarceration as a new form of slavery and segregation is catching on. People are latching onto the idea of mass incarceration as a systemic problem that can only be solved with a vast redirecting of resources into the communities that have been devastated by imprisonment. In other words, mass incarceration requires a total paradigm shift. The situation has the potential to explode. Politicians and business people don’t like explosions. When explosions appear a genuine possibility it is time to talk reform, time to re-package.

To make matters worse for purveyors of the carceral status quo, the immigrants’ rights movement has also been erupting over the last decade. From the immigrant worker strikes and demonstrations of 2006 to the endless string of demonstrations by the Dreamers and the Dream Defenders in the face of continued mass deportations, a steady stream of unrest has materialized. With the changing national demographics, key players in criminal justice need to be seen to be doing something if they want to maintain their power.

Lastly, there is the movement inside the prisons themselves. The hunger strikes at Pelican Bay in California and in Washington’s Northwest Detention Center coupled with the outpouring of solidarity these actions prompted, pose a serious threat to the already heavily smeared image of US prisons. In addition, even once notorious political prisoners are gaining increasing legitimacy. Captives from across several generations are attracting large coteries of supporters. This includes high profile individuals who have served decades behind bars, individuals like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Albert Woodfox, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Russell Maroon Shoatz and Leonard Peltier, along with more contemporary prisoners like Lynne Stewart (recently released), Marie Mason and Chelsea Manning. Inside and beyond the walls, there is rebellion in the air.

This reality raises another question: whether a Left-Right Coalition can deliver even enough change to calm the waters. Mass incarceration has become such a fundamental part of how the US addresses issues of race, crime, poverty, gender and inequality, it appears unlikely to collapse from gradual reforms whether inspired by carceral humanism, punitive alternatives to incarceration or more genuine critique. As with civil rights, pressure from below will be required, from a social movement that has the creativity to envision an alternative, the skills and legitimacy to mobilize the people who are most directly affected, and the political power to make their voices be heard and get others to join them. Perhaps this social movement is, to borrow a phrase from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, making the path by walking at this very moment.

James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He is a frequent commentator on mass incarceration, a social justice activist, and the author of three novels, all of which were written during his six and a half years of incarceration. He is currently working on a primer on mass incarceration to be published by The New Press in 2015. He can be reached at waazn1@gmail.com His writings are available at his website, www.freedomneverrests.com

The United States houses 25% of the world's inmates despite having only 5% of the world's population. This fact prompted former Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to say, "Either we have the most evil people on earth living in the U.S., or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice." The prison industrial complex has a vested interest in keeping people locked up.

The End Mass Criminalization Team is part of PDA's Civil Rights/Civil Justice platform. We work on the following issues:

Mass Incarceration

School to Prison Pipeline

Racial Profiling

Restoration of Voting Rights to People with Past Criminal Convictions

Prison Industrial Complex/Privatization of Prisons

War on Drugs/Legalization of Marijuana

Harm Reduction

Stop and Frisk

Mandatory Minimum Sentences

Prison Gerrymandering

Criminalization of Poverty

Solitary Confinement

Militarization of Law Enforcement

Incarceration of the Mentally Ill

Mass Incarceration Statistics/Facts

There are more African-Americans in prison, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850

African-Americans account for 13% of marijuana use; however they make up 80% of the prison population incarcerated for marijuana use

More than 5 million Americans have lost their right to vote due to a past felony conviction

The US has 5% of the world's population but 24% of the world's prisoners

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 2.3 million prisoners; China has 1.6 million

For profit prisons have risen 37% between 2002 and 2009. In 2011, Corrections Corporation of America recorded $1.7 billion in total revenue and the Geo Group recorded $1.6 billion. These companies spent more than $19.6 million on lobbying over the past 10 years

In 2003, African-American youth made up 16% of the nation’s overall juvenile population, but accounted for 45% of juvenile arrests

Children as young as five years old are being led out of classrooms in handcuffs for acting out or throwing temper tantrums